


stranded in June / whistling the same old tune

by FoxGlade



Series: #hashtag 'verse [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Stream of Consciousness, confusing discussions of memory recovery, pre-slash reaching critical levels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1451992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FoxGlade/pseuds/FoxGlade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[WINTER SOLDIER SPOILERS]</p><p>“You really wanna join the team? Fight the good fight? Or is this because your boy actually managed to get a hurt that didn’t heal instantly in that last mission?”</p><p>“I thought that was the whole point of me staying here,” Bucky replies, ignoring the obvious bait. “I’d eventually get sane enough to be a full-time Avenger, instead of just another civilian taking up space.”</p><p>“Okay, I know the only reason you said that is because you’re still pissed you can’t watch Cap’s back in the field these days, so I’m not going to fight you on Jane’s behalf.”</p><p>“Much obliged,” Bucky says, and Tony pokes his other arm with a screwdriver.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stranded in June / whistling the same old tune

**Author's Note:**

> i lied; this one has actual plot too. sorry it's so short. title from the song Get Some Sleep by Bic Runga. more to come, so keep watching this space.

Given the stunningly vulnerable state of Earth’s covert defences, still feeling the aftershocks a month after the destruction of SHIELD, it was surprising that it took so long for the Avengers to be needed on the battlefield once more.

Without SHIELD to deal with the small fry, and Coulson’s team being halfway across the world talking down mutant political protesters in Australia, the Avengers begin to work together against threats for the first time since New York. The first few times, only two or three of them ever go out to meet the threat – small fry doesn’t need four superheroes and two assassins, after all. But when the news continues to blow these small scuffles wildly out of control, public panic sets in, and every two-bit villain and mutant with something to prove comes out of the woodwork and heads to New York to try their luck.

“We’ll keep up the fight as long as people keep bringing it to us,” Steve says on TV. Bucky’s metal hand clenches into a fist when the reporter continues hounding him, either not seeing or purposely ignoring how obviously exhausted he is. The ice-powered mutant had fought them for the long three hours it had taken to bring in someone from Xavier’s bunch to contain him, and Steve had been frozen solid at least three times during the fight.

A hand covers his fist, gently flattening it. “You okay, Bucky?” Steve says quietly next to him. Bucky snorts.

“You were the one who was…” He waved a hand at the screen, where the rogue mutant and Ice-Man (boy, and Bucky had thought the Avengers got the lame names) were battling it out. The footage had been replayed countless times since the incident was wrapped up, Bucky knew. He’d been sitting here, eyes glued to the screen, desperate to involve himself in any way possible, since the Avengers headed out. “I should be asking you.”

“I’m fine. I had a nap, and food.” A re-heated serving of Bruce’s infamous Crazy Spicy Curry, as Clint had named it, apparently did wonders for flashbacks of being trapped under ice for decades. “Actually, I figured you could use one too. Have you been sitting here this whole time?”

“Yeah, and it was exhausting, lemme tell you.” He means to sound sarcastic, but it comes out as just plain honest. Sometimes he thinks Steve’s ability to project a moral truth field is a mutant ability, slipping through the cracks in a time where things like that didn’t happen often enough to get noticed and studied. But then, it really only works on Bucky, so it’s probably just Bucky being too dizzy over Steve to lie to him, which is all sorts of inconvenient.

“You’ve been sitting here, worrying over us, for hours. You know as well as I do it’s the stress that tires you out,” Steve is saying. He’d be so easy to ignore, to mock, if that was all there was to Steve goddamn Rogers, Bucky thinks. If he was all moral righteousness and steadfast knowledge. “Besides, you promised we’d go back to that bakery down in the Heights tomorrow morning, and I’m not afraid to drag an old man out of bed.” But Steve’s always been more than that.

“We’re both old men here, punk,” Bucky retorts automatically. Steve grins at him, bright and amused, dampening only a little when Bucky reluctantly slides his hand out from under his. “And this old man is going to take a nap, if you people are done fighting overdramatic teens in the streets.”

“Next time we’ll bring you along,” Steve replies, eyes honest to God sparkling. “All your experience _being_ an overdramatic teen, you’ll have it cleaned up in a snap.”

Bucky pauses in mid-stretch to deliver a scathing and incredibly witty reply, curses the Steve Rogers Truth Field (curses the depth of his _stupid_ feelings), and instead says, “Honestly? I’d like that.”

He doesn’t look back as he walks out of the living room, and doesn’t think about the silence that follows him.

\---

He lives in the present, these days.

Steve doesn’t understand, for all he’s tried to be quack doctor to Bucky’s messed up head, because Bucky can’t figure out how to make any of it make sense to _himself_ , let alone someone who doesn’t have it in their head 24/7. All he knows is that most of his memories have come crawling back to him in the weeks without the regular mind wipes HYDRA implemented on him, disjointed and fragmented but within his reach. But that’s the point – they’re within reach, put on a shelf, ready to be remembered whenever he wants. He has a control over recall now that’s plain unnatural; weeks of involuntary flashbacks and lapses out of reality and nightmares made entirely of memories, and now he doesn’t see a single memory behind his eyelids unless he wants to.

It’s almost impossible to describe, the way his mind had forced him to relieve every scrap of memory he’d ever had, every sight ever seen and every emotion ever felt by Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier, before they all slotted neatly into place, locked behind doors and in mental filing cabinets, ready to be brought out and viewed at a moment’s notice. But only ever when he wanted it – since the very last flash of remembrance had took him away from Movie Night banter for just a few seconds ( _“try not to hack up a lung while i’m at work, kid”, trying not to say “please be okay” because steve was always okay, **always**_ ), not a single memory had crossed his mind without his say so.

It’s liberating, but it worries Bucky right down to his bones, and the second he realised this was the second he knew he could never explain this to Steve –

Maybe he was just bad at finding the right words for all sorts of things, because he couldn’t explain him and Steve to anyone else for the life of him.

“I’ve got more memories with him than without,” he tries telling Natasha one time, when she’d found the both of them on the couch, Steve snoring with his head on Bucky’s shoulder, their legs tangled together, some show called Dog Cops on TV.  Natasha understands that, because she understands him as well as Steve does, most days (just in different ways: she understands the Winter Soldier, Steve understands who Bucky Barnes used to be, and between the two of them, they’ve got who he is now laid bare like an autopsy. He doesn’t know whether or not to be grateful they haven’t figured that out yet). She understands that, but it still isn’t enough to get her to understand _them_.

“We’ve had each other’s backs since we met,” he tells Bruce over tea, Tony and Steve arguing over something that might be the paint job for Sam’s new Falcon wings in the next room. Behind slightly fogged over glasses, Bruce’s eyes flicker to where Tony’s wildly waving his tablet around, scowling at Steve’s laughter, and Bucky knows he understands, too. But what he and Tony are is different to what Bucky and Steve are, in ways Bruce would probably have no problems articulating, so he’s back to square one.

“I have no idea why I’m stuck on this,” he says to Clint, one arm thrown over his eyes as he collapses on the couch on another day. “It’s not like I’m thinking we have to justify ourselves or something, I just-“

“It’s nice to be able to sum things up,” Clint cuts him off with a shrug. “S’why we’ve got so many fancy labels for shit in this century. You should try Google.”

“I might.” He’s given up trying to explain that he’s not Steve, he hasn’t spent seventy years sleeping straight through every social and technological advance. But then again, it’s not as if he’d ever had much time to chase up on things like new names and categories for relationships, so maybe it’s not such a bad idea. “Thanks for the tip, I guess.”

“Don’t sweat it, Barnes,” Clint replies, not even looking up from where he’s fiddling with the inner working of an arrowhead. “I get the feeling. You know I don’t even know if me and Phil are married? It’s happened like three times, but one of the countries it happened in axed the law a week after, so it was void, and the bastard never told me if he filed those annulment papers for the other two times. Sneaky fucker,” he adds fondly.

Googling labels doesn’t specifically help, in that he doesn’t find a ready-made name for them (he does read about something called _demisexuality_ that he’s going to talk to Steve about later, though), but it helps narrow down what they’re _not_. Which is basically every single one of these rigid outlines for relationships. He throws the tablet at the wall of his (their) bedroom in frustration, cursing Stark when it just bounces off the plaster and onto the carpet, and pretends to be asleep when Steve comes in a few minutes later.

He’s still pretending to be asleep an hour later, trying to think about the whole situation objectively, which is a tad difficult when Steve’s whuffling quietly in his ear, one arm slung over his waist.

The thing that people aren’t getting, he thinks, is that they’re not in some tragic romance movie, where it’s obvious that the two are in love but they don’t know the other is just as dizzy as them. Bucky was sweet on Steve long before the serum juiced him up to supersoldier status, and the looks Steve has given him since they met have long since confirmed that it’s not exactly unrequited.

It’s just… never been the right time. Steve was sick for a long time, and then there was no time to be risking arrest just for some canoodling, and then the army happened and there was no time for anything except the next mission, and then –

Well. Then there was the Winter Soldier. And now there’s this, and still, somehow it’s not the right time.

He huffs and inches closer to Steve, closing his eyes. It’s not the right time for any of that, but that doesn’t mean he won’t take whatever Steve’s willing to give.

\---

“So, how does one go about auditioning for this boyband of yours?” he asks Tony the next afternoon. Tony starts, tool in his hand scratching along Bucky’s metal arm with a shriek. Bucky smirks as Tony curses, then starts fiddling with the wires again.

“Scare me like that again and you’re getting a pink paint job in your sleep,” he warns. “You really wanna join the team? Fight the good fight? Or is this because your boy actually managed to get a hurt that didn’t heal instantly in that last mission?”

“I thought that was the whole point of me staying here,” Bucky replies, ignoring the obvious bait. “I’d eventually get sane enough to be a full-time Avenger, instead of just another civilian taking up space.”

“Okay, I know the only reason you said that is because you’re still pissed you can’t watch Cap’s back in the field these days, so I’m not going to fight you on Jane’s behalf.”

“Much obliged,” Bucky says, and Tony pokes his other arm with a screwdriver.

“Short answer, as soon as you get approval from our esteemed team leader,” he continues, voice slightly muffled when he shoves the screwdriver between his teeth and uses both hands to mess around with the frayed wire buried in the underside of Bucky’s arm. “Long answer? Since we’re running our own affairs now, pretty much whenever the rest of us say so. I’d love to give you the whole psych eval, compatibility test, probation period thing, but let’s face it, the rest of us didn’t exactly get that either. Living here has been enough of a compatibility trial run, anyway, and you’ve passed with more-or-less flying colours. So, say the word, buddy, and we’ll take you out to the baseball game next time we’re on to bat.”

Bucky takes this is all in, hand flexing involuntarily as Tony continues to dig. “I’d like to,” he says eventually. “Next time. I know there’s not much room for another sniper, but-“

“But we could always use another ground fighter, we’ve got enough eyes up high as is,” Tony interrupts firmly. “You want me to upgrade this for hand-to-hand while you’re here?”

“It’s gotten me through seventy years of combat, Stark, I think it’s fine,” he retorts, a little harsher than he means to. Tony doesn’t react at all, except for maybe a slight tightening around the eyes.

“You’re an Avenger now, apparently,” is all he says, completely serious. “You get Stark tech just like the rest of us. Call me the unofficial backer.”

\---

He doesn’t tell Steve. It’s dumb, it’s incredibly dumb, but hey, what’s more stupid thing in a long line of them?

It’s a mistake, and he knows it the second JARVIS sounds the alert and he follows Steve to go suit up. The worst is that he doesn’t even say anything; just watches Bucky put on the battered outfit he’d dragged with him to Stark tower, half out of his mind with a flood of memories going through his brain at a thousand frames per second.

The others don’t give him more than a second glance when he files into the jet that Natasha had “requisitioned” from the wreckage of SHIELD, and the fact that he remains so unquestioned drives him crazy enough to break the silence two minutes into the flight.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, okay?” he yells to Steve over the plane’s engine. Steve checks the straps on his shield, such an un-fucking-necessary action that it pushes Bucky from apologetic straight into pissed off. “Look, I don’t have to tell you every single thing I do! You’re not my keeper!”

“I _am_ your keeper, actually,” Steve replies, and it’s cold enough that Bucky sits back in his seat. “And no, you don’t have to tell me everything, but you did have to tell me _this_. How’d you think this was going to play out without me knowing, Bucky?”

He honestly doesn’t know, and he curses the damned Steve Rogers Truth Field once again. “I wasn’t-“

“Save it for after,” Steve cuts him off, and the look on his face is so Captain America that he can barely find that kid from Brooklyn in his features.

Fine. If that was how he was going to play it. Bucky pushes aside all thoughts on how childish they’re being, ignores the shocked (Bruce) concerned (Thor) amused (Tony) looks on everyone else’s faces, and brings out the Winter Soldier’s memories, letting them play across his eyelids like a particularly gripping film.

The Winter Soldier opened his eyes and waited for his orders.

\---

They fight the good fight, they beat back the crazy scientist with her pack of mutated dogs (wolves? They’re the size of bears in any case, and when they snarl, foam drips from their jaws), and when Steve puts a hand on his shoulder, the Winter Soldier slips away to let Bucky back in. Not that he ever left. Like he said, it’s hard to explain to anyone that isn’t actually in his head with him.

“You worked well with Widow out there,” Steve says, and Bucky hears “I forgive you” like it’s being sung by chorus girls.

“You bet I did, punk,” he replies. Then, unable to stop himself, “I pass the audition?”

Steve gives him a calculating once-over, and Bucky finds himself straightening into parade rest without thought.

“Welcome to the Avengers, Winter Soldier,” Captain America says, before Steve grins and pulls him into a hug, right there on the battlefield and seven feet away from the bloody corpse of a mutant wolf-dog.

It’s not the perfect time for much else, Bucky thinks, ignoring the catcalls from the other Avengers, but it is the perfect time for this. And that suits him just fine.


End file.
